First of all, congratulations to Father John on his Silver Jubilee! May God allow him to lead our parish for another 25 years!

Second of all, thanks to all those who came out for the soup kitchen volunteering, but I'll get to that in a sec...

Let me first get this out of the way:

I realize I haven't been keeping up with things as much as I should have lately. Sunil and Dollin have often had to lead the way and I apologize that I haven't been able to do more. But while I will try to be more active as president of our youth group, I must repeat the warning I gave when I first became president, I have great time constraints to my activities since this is my last semester of college and I'm looking for a job and I'm not even sure where I'm going to be living in a few months. Nevertheless I hope to try my best and with your help we should be able to do great things with this group.

Moving on...

Again, thanks to everyone who helped out with the soup kitchen. We were able to give a lot of food that did a lot of good, so we can feel proud of that. We are also looking for other soup kitchens to volunteer at, so if you have one in mind, please send me an email, or post it up on the MCYM NJ website: http://mcymnj.blogspot.com

(I hope to update that website soon by the way, but I'd like to remind people that anyone can add to it, through comments or by adding a blog entry: just use the username: mcymnj and the password: churchgroup )

I'd like to also thank Sunil for arranging for those T-shirts. That's right, those who came out to volunteer got T-shirts. That's not why we volunteered mind you, but it is cool, thanks Sunil!

But for future plans:

We need to start having meetings again. I'd like to try to get going the elaborate meeting plans I had at the beginning of the semester but the main thing is we should try meeting again. The whole Easter season I think has sidelined our plans but we should try to have a meeting next month. I'm probably not going to be able to make it next week since I have a number of deadlines, but if a lot of other people can I'm willing to rearrange my schedule. Otherwise I'd say we could have a meeting two weeks from now, although that is an afternoon mass so that might be hard for people.

What is certain, is that if at all possible we WILL have a meeting April 20th. I'd like to also do some fun activities as a group either after mass on the 20th or around then, depending on availabilities. One idea was going to Dave and Buster's and getting some good food and playing some games there.

Also, we should think of our next volunteering project. It's nice that we did the food drive, but we can do more. I'm open to ideas and I'd like to try to do another soup kitchen if people can offer some locations. Also, I think it would be good to do a bake sale and raise some money for a charity. I know we've talked about this a lot before, but it is something that we can easily do if we put our mind to it.

Thirdly, let's see if anyone can come up for something special to do for Father John's celebration on the 27th. That's when we as a parish will do our act of honoring him and it would be nice if we could do something as a youth group. I'm signed to give a speech and they might have already filled the schedule with events already but I think if the youth group as a whole could do something for Father John it would be great.

Finally,

MONDAY IS THE LAST DAY TO SIGN UP FOR THE TORONTO CONFERENCE!!!

It should be a ton of fun so please give it a try. It's only a few days (July 31st to August 2nd) but it'll give you memories and friends for a lifetime.

If you do want to go, tell me so I can relay the info to the coordinators and also so I can help with transportation and costs. Currently, our plan is driving, although me and my brother will actually be driving separately since we have some cousins near Toronto we hope to visit along the way. But if this leaves anyone with transport problems tell me and we'll figure something out. Also if I can get a number on who's going, I might be able to see if the Church can cover some costs.